Alternate Opening to The Avengers: Better or Worse?

As Avengers fans brace for the release of its upcoming Blu-Ray treatment, Joss Whedon and the good folks at Disney Studios dispatched one of the many bonus features on the disc to the internet recently. This minute and a half long clip is in fact an alternate opening to Whedon's magnum opus, and gives us a taste of what he originally had in mind:

It plays far more bleakly than the beginning that hit theaters with a quietly played debriefing of Cobie Smulders' Maria Hill at S.H.E.I.L.D. headquarters. It establishes Maria's strained relationship to Nick Fury, and sets up the film as a flashback tinged with a foreboding sense of tragedy, an opener that most definitely would have established a darker feel from the get-go.

If this was indeed the original take Whedon had in mind, it stands to reason that the entire structure of the film was changed within the editing process, and that Hill's perspective played an even greater part in the initial conception of the film. Get a taste of it here for yourself, and then do a little happy dance, because this is just one of many deleted scenes and special features that you can expect to find on the Blu-Ray edition that's set to hit stores September 25th!

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Vadim Newquist is a writer, director, actor, animator, fire fighter, stunt driver, martial arts instructor, snake wrangler and time traveling bounty hunter who scales tall buildings with his bare hands and wrestles sharks in his spare time. He can do ten consecutive backflips in one jump, make cars explode with his mind, and can give fifty people a high-five at once without even lifting his hands. He holds multiple PhDs in nuclear physics, osteopathic medicine, behavioral psychology, breakdancing, and chilling out. He currently resides in Gotham City inside his stately mansion with his butler Alfred and his two cats.